9) The Radiant Seas, by Catherine Asaro

A couple of months back I reported here that award-winning author Catherine Asaro, pained at my dissing her works on my website, had sent me three of her novels to try and make me change my mind; and that indeed I very much enjoyed her first, Primary Inversion. It was therefore with a certain amount of eager anticipation that I turned to The Radiant Seas which picks up the story from where we left it at the end of the first book.

Oh dear. A real disappointment. Lots of infodumping, tedious handwaving technicalese – the nadir, close to the end, is this sentence:

With a rest mass of 1.9 eV and a charge of 5.95×10^-25 C, abitons only needed an accelerator with a 50 cm radius and 0.0001 Telsa [sic] magnet.

Which I wouldn’t mind if it actually helped the book make sense; but it doesn’t. Anyway thanks to the helpfully provided diagram I spent much time wondering how you could possibly keep anything, let alone tons of antimatter, in a Klein bottle (whose inside is the same as its outside).

I was quite unable to suspend my disbelief to take seriously the family and interplanetary politics as I could for the first book. The good guys always escape certain doom in the nick of time, unlike the bad guys. And worst of all, my particular bête noire, there is a chatty artificial intelligence which tries to get its owner to call it by a proper name. Aargh.

Out of a (possibly misplaced) sense of honour, I will read the third book she sent me, but I don’t feel any sense of urgency about it.